ASP.NET - Deployment

Local deployment : In this case, the entire application is contained within a virtual directory and all the contents and assemblies are contained within it and available to the application.

Global deployment : In this case, assemblies are available to every application running on the server.

There are different techniques used for deployment, however, we will discuss the following most common and easiest ways of deployment:

XCOPY deployment

Copying a Website

Creating a set up project

XCOPY Deployment

XCOPY deployment means making recursive copies of all the files to the target folder on the target machine. You can use any of the commonly used techniques:

FTP transfer

Using Server management tools that provide replication on a remote site

MSI installer application

XCOPY deployment simply copies the application file to the production server and sets a virtual directory there. You need to set a virtual directory using the Internet Information Manager Microsoft Management Console (MMC snap-in).

Copying a Website

The Copy Web Site option is available in Visual Studio. It is available from the Website -> Copy Web Site menu option. This menu item allows copying the current web site to another local or remote location. It is a sort of integrated FTP tool.

Using this option, you connect to the target destination, select the desired copy mode:

Overwrite

Source to Target Files

Sync UP Source And Target Projects

Then proceed with copying the files physically. Unlike the XCOPY deployment, this process of deployment is done from Visual Studio environment. However, there are following problems with both the above deployment methods:

You pass on your source code.

There is no pre-compilation and related error checking for the files.

The initial page load will be slow.

Creating a Setup Project

In this method, you use Windows Installer and package your web applications so it is ready to deploy on the production server. Visual Studio allows you to build deployment packages. Let us test this on one of our existing project, say the data binding project.

Step (3) : Choosing the default location ensures that the set up project will be located in its own folder under the root directory of the site. Click on okay to get the first splash screen of the wizard.